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Music to Chill Your Blood and Rattle Your Bones

I made a playlist for Halloween, creatively titled “Halloween”. It’s still a work in progress–I need three more songs so that it will contain 31, but I haven’t found them yet. Everyone’s idea of creepy is different, so maybe these won’t do it for you, but I tried to include varied types. Classic (“Bad Moon Rising”, “I Put a Spell on You”), slightly silly (“Werewolves of London”, “Monster Mash”), genuinely unsettling (“Down by the Water”, “Candlelight Song”), horror movie scores (the “Halloween” theme, “Tubular Bells”), and a few that aren’t easily classified (“Biting Down”, “Oh Death”.

If you have any suggestions, I would love to hear them. I’ve googled this topic to death and culled my favorites from just about every spooky songs list on the internet, it seems. I would be especially interested if you have suggestions for songs by artists of color, since this, like so many others, seems to be a very white-dominated genre.

I deliberately didn’t include “Thriller”, “Psycho Killer”, or anything by Oingo Boingo or Tom Waits because, above all, this is a playlist I made for myself, of songs I actually want to listen to, and those don’t fall into that category. I’m not interested in anything like the songs on this list either (trigger warnings for pretty much everything ever at that link); gore and violence and offensiveness for shock value are not my style.

Creepy to me is a feeling more than anything else, which makes it difficult to search out things that qualify, but I think I did a pretty good job here. I hope you agree. Halloween is the entire month of October as far as I’m concerned, so, listen and enjoy!

Youtube version, with a slightly different order toward the end because I messed it up and couldn’t figure out how to fix it:

Bonus: this terrifyingly evil Tom Waits cover of “HeighHo” from “Snow White”, which isn’t included on the main playlist because I hate it, but which I’m sharing here because it is definitely creepy.